I just released YESMAN INTERVIEW — a live interview I did with the Yesman himself at this year’s (utterly magnificent) Festival of Yes.

Alex, the Yesman, is a great friend and easily one of the most rad, vibrant, ringing-with-life humans I have ever met. It was a grand pleasure to discuss and share the power, usefulness, and philosophy of “yes” with him, a central pillar to the dude’s infectiously inspirational way of being. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

In 2021, I created the “Needlestack”, a simple grassroots solution to making the browse the web by best.

Playing on the metaphor of “finding a needle in a haystack,” the Needlestack was a list of links to what I personally felt were the best pages on the entire internet. The idea was to make my Needlestack, encourage others to make their own, and to link them together — weaving a navigable web of links to the best pages on the web.

With the turn of each year, I find great benefit and orientation in reflecting on the year past and envisioning the one to come.

While a new year is just an arbitrarily chosen point in Earth’s lap around the sun, it is also a regular reminder of transition. And as transitions tend to cause us to pause and reflect, a new year seems a sweet, cosmically-tuned reminder to pause, ”pull our heads out of the water,” and look around.

I don’t believe in resolutions or fixating on specific goals. Rather, I liken the process to “stopping for a few minutes to study the map, check that we’re heading in the right direction, and boldly continue with the journey of life.” Goals can help us achieve what they’re aimed at, but also become blinders to other opportunities that arise in the present. I attempt to walk a middle path, aiming my awareness at certain things, but not fixating upon them.

This January, I launched my version of the Needlestack, a new type of page for the internet.

The idea of the Needlestack is simple: if everyone with a blog or website had a dedicated page of links to what they personally consider the best pages on the entire internet, and we had a directory linking those pages together, we could separate “the needles from the haystack” of the internet and make the internet browsable by best.

The challenge for the Needlestack now is to find its audacious first adopters willing to make their own without much social proof. If my Needlestack is the flint, those first to make their own Needlestack are the sparks needed for this new idea to catch and spread (shout out to CEDAR for being the first to make the leap!).

Fortunately, the Needlestack has compelling incentives built into the idea to get and keep it growing. Rather than leave them to intuition, I will briefly outline each below.

Symbols matter more than you think.

In a column titled, The Story of a Thing, a New York Times Reporter asked a few dozens famous creatives, “what’s your most prized possession?” While the answers varied widely, from a factory table where women sewed flowers onto hats in the 1960s, to a picture of Harriet Tubman, to a fifteen-year-old tea bag, each object was not prized for its usefulness or economic value, but for its meaning. Everyone’s most prized possession was a symbol — an object highly charged with meaning.

Symbols are a curious, human thing. How is it that a fifteen-year-old tea bag could be someone’s most prized possession?

My friend is a true artist. A feeler with strong intuition, she lives in deep connection with the desert she calls home.

Her walks through the desert are her daily source of renewal. The smell of creosote in rare desert rains moves her more than anyone is moved by a smell. She feels an energy between all things that I could once only logically intuit.

I am often inspired by her connection to everything. Our time together has connected me to all these gifts, strengthening my connection with the natural world. Recently, however, she told me something I simply have not been able to believe or connect with: red-tailed hawks are messengers.

This afternoon, I’m getting paid to sit under an umbrella next to a pool, read books, and write these words in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

It’s a spectacular summer day. Upper seventies. A slight breeze. Overplayed but otherwise decent music sounds from the speakers that surround. A couple of kids are shooting each other with squirt-guns in the pool while their moms chat at a table under an umbrella. A man that looks like a walrus is turning red with sun in a lounge chair. Thunderheads grow off on the western horizon, but the sky above is a pale blue canvas.

As I plan to go to flight school this fall, I’m particularly aware of commercial airliners silently drawing white streaks across that pale blue canvas and the smaller planes that buzz by in approach to the Flagstaff airport. I’ve been projecting myself into the cockpit of every plane that passes by.

A highlight reel of WONDER WANDER 2018, by Christopher Bellizzi.

From September 21st to 25th I hosted WONDER WANDER 2018, a gathering of adventurous and creative souls at The Range Rider's Lodge—the stunning, old log-cabin lodge I run in the summertime a mile outside Yellowstone National Park.

As someone who writes about full, vibrant living, you'd be surprised by how often I think about death. A decade ago, a mosquito bite nearly killed me, and since, the thought of death has yet to escape my head.

At first, this dark thought was maintained by the shock of how close I had ventured to life's edge. However, I began stumbling upon benefits of having the thought of death in mind. Benefits in big ways: realizing the future was more of a question mark than a guarantee, I placed more value in the present. And smaller ways: death's consideration made public speaking less intimidating. After nearly a decade of toying with the thought of death and its various surprising effects, it recently dawned on me: remembering that you are going to die is the ultimate catalyst for a better life.

Leopold Huber is the founder Hippohelp—a new, totally free, map-based work trade website that can help you travel the world for a fraction of what your journey would otherwise cost. I absolutely love this site, it's navigable map feature making it the easiest work trade site to search for volunteer opportunities wherever you want to go.

Browsing the map on Hippohelp, I chanced to encounter Leopold's own farm in Guilin, China! Fascinated by this young entrepreneur turning his own soil in the Far East, I wrote and asked if he'd like to share a bit about his life and Hippohelp with readers of The Living Theory.

If you're looking for adventure and to fill up your bank account this summer, now is the time to apply for a seasonal, summer job on CoolWorks.

CoolWorks is the most badass, awesome job board on the internet. Employers are screened beforehand with the requirement that they offer "cool jobs" or jobs in "cool places." Opportunities are listed for national parks, ski resorts, cruise ships, rafting companies, summer camps, travel companies, beach towns, ranches, and an endless variety of other uncategorizable cool gigs.

Life is full of paradoxes. One of them is that only when we don't have something do we truly appreciate its value.

A few examples:

• When we’re sick, just being healthy is a cause for joy.
• Only when we lose someone do we fully understand how much they meant to us.
• If we sleep on the ground for a week, returning to bed is like floating on a cloud.
   

The absence of something reveals its value. And the opposite is also true: having something causes us to lose sight of its value. Following this train of thought, if we have everything all the time, then we can appreciate nothing. And contrarily, if we have nothing, then we can appreciate everything.

At the age of 20, Hunter S. Thompson wrote a friend in response to a request for life advice. While rejecting the idea that one can tell another specifically what to do with their life, Thompson's general guidelines for deciding how to answer such a monumental question for ourselves are remarkably profound and useful.

There seems to be an online debate as to whether travel makes us more or less employable. Many traveler bloggers like to cite all the skills honed while traveling that you can list on your resume while others allege that having a gap in your resume is less enticing to employers than if you worked the whole time.

Both sides make compelling arguments, but in generalizing travel they gloss over one vital detail – what did you actually do?

Travel is a vague term.

Travel could be relaxing in a beach-side hammock in Cancun for six months, which might not help your employability. By no means am I saying you shouldn't do that, it's just probably not going to make you more employable. Travel could also be volunteering in Africa to save endangered animals from poachers or climbing Mount Everest, which would absolutely make you more employable. Basically, the more adventurous or purposeful your travel, the more likely it would illustrate value to a potential employer.

There exists a gap between the start of an endeavor and perceivable result. Between the beginning of a journey and the first signs of measurable progress. A kind of void. A void people don't often speak of while inside.

A month ago, I received a book in the mail called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Someone clearly purchased it on Amazon and had it sent to me. Who that was, I have no clue.

I was deeply intrigued by the mystery of not knowing who sent me the book, so it jumped to the top of my reading list and I read it a couple weeks ago. It was profound and full of parallels to my own life. I'll be adding it to the Bookshelf soon.

One part of the book particularly struck me. The author leaves the shore of a vast inlet in the Canadian wilderness in a kayak at midnight, bound for the opposite shore.

There are dozens of credit cards that offer airline mileage bonuses to entice potential customers to sign up. For instance, I just picked up the Capital One Venture Card, which offers a 40,000 airline miles bonus if one spends $3,000 on the card in the first three months.

If you spend $3,000 in three months, you can simply make your purchases on the card, and receive 40,000 free airline miles. Just pay your credit card bills immediately after. The process won't cost you a cent. It's beautiful.

Before I launched this website, one question plagued me:

Is motivation from dissatisfaction better than complacency?

Let me break it down:

Someone is working a decent job. Their pay is above average. Their friends and family are happy for them. They feel they're on the right track. They don't necessarily enjoy the work, but hey, it's survivable.

Then they read an article on this website. They encounter the concept that some people's motivation for work is not money or social reasons, but genuine interest or love for what they do. They begin to wonder, “Am I really interested in this? Is this the work I want to spend my life doing?”

“Don't try to outsmart me!” I yelled at my dad. “I know you're cheating.”

He wasn't. He's just standing at the foot of the bed, glad his son is alive.

A nurse walks by in the hallway, her reflection momentarily flashes across the window to the courtyard. “Why is the nurse outside?” I ask him. He attempts to explain it's her reflection, but I hear none of it.

Something's wrong. Within seconds, I've lost control. Tremors start in my hands as fear violently grips me. My fingernails force themselves into the palms of my hand and my toes vice grip the bed sheet. Tremors develop into shaking throughout my body that exponentially ramps into forceful convulsions. Every fiber of muscle fires and recoils in a violent ferocity as I'm powerfully ripped back and forth with ever increasing intensity. In a tenth of a second, my universe rushes to a single point and not unlike the moment before the explosion of a star, I'm gone.

You know that rare moment of clarity you get every once in a long while? That 30 seconds of brilliance, many times beyond the ordinary capacity of your brain, where you undeniably know you should do something. Maybe you just fully grasped a situation, can see beyond your fears, have an idea to create something great, realize a untouched niche in which you could start a business, or know you need to change a certain aspect of your life.

I had the brilliant idea one day to ride a bicycle across the United States to raise money for a non-profit children's hospital that saved my life. I had no idea what to do or how to do any of this (besides ride a bicycle). That same day, I just decided I was going to do it and kept progressing towards my goal. By the time I finished, I was an expert at bicycle touring, charity fundraising, conversing with strangers, TV interviews, and bicycle maintenance. I won a $10,000 scholarship, wrote a featured journal, had my photography published, raised nearly, $100,000 for my cause, inspired others, gained so much confidence, and altered the entire course of my life. Did I have any idea what was going to happen? Nope, I mostly feared getting hit by a car or my efforts going unnoticed.